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John Roberts avatar Ubuntu

Cron not running a command properly

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John Roberts

I have HP ProLiant Utilities installed on my Ubuntu Server. Using the following shell command I am able to save the output of the RAID status to a log file:

sudo ssacli ctrl all show config > /var/logs/raid.log

I then tried to create a cron job so that on a daily basis the log file is overwritten with the status. My cron job looks like this:

30 15 * * * ssacli ctrl all show config > /var/logs/raid.log #Log RAID Status

This cron job is for root user.

The problem is that, if I go to Webmin and run this cron job by pressing "Save & Run Now" the log file is created. But if I let the cron job run at it's designated time, the log file is created but is blank.

I think it might have something to do with the fact that I need to run the ssacli in sudo mode

Can anyone help please?

Thanks

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Jos
First rule of `cron`: always provide full paths. In this case, you may need to write `/usr/bin/ssacli` instead of `ssacli`. The executable `ssacli` may be found somewhere else than in `/usr/bin/`; you can find out where with `which ssacli`.
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John Roberts avatar
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John Roberts
Awesome. thanks. that was it. I just had to put full path to ssacli which was /usr/sbin/ssacli
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waltinator avatar Ubuntu
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waltinator

Jobs run through cron aren't run in the same runtime environment that you have on your desktop. None of your PATH changes, or other environment variable settings from ~/.bashrc are automatically propagated to your cron job. For example, there's no $DISPLAY, so GUI programs need special treatment (read man xhost).

One can set environment variables for all one's cron jobs in the crontab file Read man 5 crontab.

Look at the results of echo "=== id ===";id;echo "=== set ===";set;echo "=== env ===";env | sort;echo "=== alias ===";alias in each of your environments.

Since the command part of the crontab line is, by default, interpreted by /bin/sh, which has a simpler syntax than /bin/bash, I recommend having command be a call to a bash script (executable, mounted, starts with #!/bin/bash) which sets up the environment, then calls the desired program.

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